The year-old Spaniard recently married to a wealthy English beauty, and is days away from opening a luxury boutique hotel off the southern coast of Thailand.
But when the Royal Thai Police storm the hotel and arrest him for blackmail and extortion, "Rafa" is thrown into Bangkok's most notorious jail. In desperation, he reaches out to the one man who can prove his innocence. By: Christopher Reich. Assigned to examine a portentous tape sneaked out of Moscow by a mole, CIA Kremlinologist Charlie Stone finds himself in an espionage investigation of staggering complexity.
As he hops among three continents, often the target of both the KGB and the CIA, Stone succeeds in vindicating his father, branded a traitor by McCarthy, while nosing out a plot by the head of the KGB to stage a violent coup during a Moscow summit that will end glasnost and set the world on its ear.
By: Joseph Finder. Lyndsey was once a top handler in the Moscow Field Station, where she was known as the "human lie detector" and praised for recruiting some of the most senior Russian officials. But now, three Russian assets have been exposed - including one of her own - and the CIA is convinced there's a mole in the department. With years of work in question and lives on the line, Lyndsey is thrown back into life at the agency, this time tracing the steps of those closest to her.
By: Alma Katsu. By: Charles Todd. By: David Ignatius. France, July a month after the Allied landings in Normandy, and the liberation of Europe is under way. In London, her husband, Owen Quinn, an officer with Royal Navy Intelligence, discovers the truth about her role in the Allies' sophisticated deception at the heart of D-Day. The shocking blowback arrived in the Hammett Award-winning The Nearest Exit when the Department of Tourism was almost completely wiped out as the result of an even more insidious plot.
Worse still, it's beginning to look as if Tourism's enemies are gearing up for a final, fatal blow. With An American Spy , Olen Steinhauer, by far the best espionage writer in a generation, delivers a searing international thriller that will settle once and for all who is pulling the strings and who is being played. Not only a veteran theater actor, he works regularly in film and television.
He lives in New York City. There are many, many characters in this book and the story is quite complicated. It helped to have re-read The Nearest Exit just before embarking on the "listen"; however, I still found the book quite difficult to follow as a listener. I expect that the book would be a very satisfying "read" because, when confused, I could have gone back to review previous chapters. This being said, I enjoy a good puzzle and An American Spy is one of these.
Pittu is an excellent narrator, making this audiobook one of the best performances I have heard this year. What other book might you compare An American Spy to and why? This is the third in the series and picks up right after. Pittu's accents are subtle enough to never get in the way of comprehension but still provide a good feel for the nationality of the characters. He never misses the humor or irony inherent in the text. Any additional comments? All three Weaver novels are timely, suspenseful and witty.
They are not necessarily an. This book is well written, has an excellent and consistently engaging plot and piles a few more layers of personality on the fictional portrait of Milo.
While it does not, of course, have the behind-the-Wall Cold War ambiance of the author's books set in an unspecified Soviet Bloc country, the book brings its own lesser joys of time and place. The author's command of the China setting is not so masterly as is his knowledge of Soviet Bloc countries, perhaps expected inasmuch as he has not lived in China but has lived in a former Soviet Bloc nation. The narrator is quite competent.
My only complaint: the ending seemed to be tied up hastily with some all-too-convenient and not entirely satisfying twists. Overall: certainly worthwhile. Other books by Fiction. Girl Fistfights Boy. Against the Country: A Novel. Grimly Jane. Manners That Matter for Moms. The Inner Society. Other books by The Tourist.
The Nearest Exit by Olen Steinhauer. Death Wears a Mask by Ashley Weaver. A Deception at Thornecrest by Ashley Weaver. An Act of Villainy by Ashley Weaver.
Milo Talon by Louis L'Amour. Sort order. Nov 17, David Putnam rated it it was amazing. If you like spy novels, this trilogy has a real feel to it. It tells the story from the human side of the character, and makes him real rather than some kind of super hero.
This series is second right after I am Pilgrim. I highly recommend them. David Putnam author of The Bruno Johnson series. Milo Weaver is a former member of a super secret unit of the CIA, known as the Department of Tourism where the agents are known as Tourists.
They are famous within certain high levels for their abilities to move in and out of countries leaving about the same trails behind as ghosts. They are also celebrated for their success as assassins.
Many people believe the Tourists are a fable. A few months ago a distraught father, mistakenly believing Weaver murdered his fifteen year old daughter shot Weaver in front of his wife and daughter. A very high level Chinese intelligence operative, Xin Zhu, aimed the father at Weaver, while at the same time orchestrating the murder of 33 Tourists, decimating the Department and causing its dissolution.
Its brand new director, Alan Drummond was blamed and fired. The action takes place in just before the Olympics being held in Beijing. Drummond decides to become a one man almost wrecking crew and seeks to take down Xin Zhu. It is quite some time before Weaver enters An American Spy. The beginning shows the alarms of two vastly different spy agencies, one in Germany, the other in China as the surviving Tourists start their offense.
Picture maybe a creature trying to eat itself, an ouroboros perhaps? Paranoia and jealousy is a true legacy of the Cultural Revolution. You will be wrong, and then you will be shocked. I think the British word is gobsmacked.
An American Spy is original in making families and the costs they pay an integral part of the story. Who tossed the apartment? The good guys or the bad guys or is it always possible to tell the difference? Steinhauer tells his story using several POVs, making for a richer novel. This does have the disadvantage of Weaver not being the strongest character. Rarely is intelligence, especially an active operation able to get to point b from point A.
Nice to find a writer who refuses to dumb down his story, or to make it about absurd Bond wannabes either. View 1 comment. Mar 07, Carol rated it liked it Shelves: mystery , goodreads-giveaway , spy , thriller. Where is Milo? With the first two books in this series, "The Tourist" and "Nearest Exit", Milo Weaver brilliantly takes center stage as a CIA agent who works for a secret sub-division known as the Department of Tourism.
Milo is a different kind of spy, suicidal, smart and sometimes funny in a sad defeated kind of way. He is good at handling his assignments even if it is an an unorthodox fashion. He is given the minimal amount of information on his assignment which make them even more difficult.
H Where is Milo? He travels all over the world, using several fictitious names. Even Milo Weaver is not his real name. He is fluent in German and Russian, stealing to raise money for his work, pissing off his boss and even killing when he has to. He gets his ass kicked and he is emotionally destroyed at times, and he is addicted to amphetamines.
Milo has to stay alert to keep from being killed. But Milo has a soft side. He is married to a woman he has to lie to and as a result she leaves him. And he has a six year old daughter he loves and misses dearly.
When he is told to kill a 15 yr old German girl. An assignment his handlers know he can not do. But the girl is killed by someone else in the CIA and as a result, Milo is seen as a washed up bad boy who needs to be retired and not just by the CIA.
Xin Zhu, an extremely obese agency head in Chinese Intelligence, orchestrates the destruction of the Department of Tourism having 33 of the CIA agents killed all over the world in one of the best plot twist in any spy novel.
His reason, he believes that the CIA is responsible for the death of his son in Sudan. The head of Tourism, Alan Drummond is fired. The Tourist department is shut down and its New York offices are emptied. Xin is not done with his destruction. He has Milo shot by the grieving father of the killed teenage girl at the end of the last book and this is where An American Spy starts.
The first part of this book is devoted to Xin Zhu and his sneaking his wide load around China gathering information on what the CIA is planning to do to him in retaliation for his killing of the 33 agents. His cohorts in Chinese intelligence are not happy with Xin Zhu's actions but he is not punished. There is talk of a mole inside Chinese Intelligence but there is always a mole in every spy network, inside every spy novel.
Xin Zhu and his fat ass takes up the first quarter of this book. But enough of his super size shenanigans. Patiently, I waited for Milo Weaver and his bad attitude to appear, ready to get back in action. It had been 8 weeks since he had been shot in the gut and he was recovered enough to look for work.
Although Milo has to watch what he eats and drinks to not upset his injured digestive track, he has dinner parties at his apartment with fellow unemployed CIA boss Alan Drummond. Milo and his estranged wife are back together after she witness him being shot and he is looking forward to a regular job outside the CIA and living with his family.
He is still friends with Alan Drummond,who is restless and planning to get back at Xin for the murder of 33 tourist and humiliation that followed. Alan is out of spies and a job but that does not stop him. He won't tell Milo what he is planning nor will he directly ask Milo to join his operation. Instead, Drummond goes to London and then disappears, shamelessly dragging a reluctant Milo into his plans, not to mention endangering Milo's family. The trouble is no one knows where Alan is or what he is up to.
Milo is lead around Europe by another former Tourist, to the Middle East and Asia like a dog in a harness, playing a very passive part with no thoughts or plans of his own, except to save his family and get back to his life.
Walk here, sit there, good dog Milo. Hell, he even has a dog name. This book was a Milo lite spy novel. In fact Milo could have sat this one out because he was barely there. The writing style of this book is to report an incident, usually a murder scene, and then many chapters later the same incident is replayed by another perspective giving insight into why it happened and who was responsible.
This worked well for one key scene in the first book but Steinhauer does this so much in this book that it is confusing and annoying. There are too many characters in this book. Some only enter only briefly in the beginning and then reappear so much later you forget who they are.
There is none of the intricate plotting that comes together to make a good spy novel as Steinhauer has done in the past. And none of the character development that the first two books had that drew you into the book and if you had not read the previous books you would have never know the significance of some of the brief moments the characters from the past had in this novel.
I feel as if this is a bridge to another book and hopefully a better planned out spy novel. It was not junk food, the writing is good and intelligent but there are lots of loose threads in the plot that needed to be sewn together tighter.
So I hope another book will follow. I will still read more from this author. I just expected so much more because the first two novels were the best written spy novels since John LeCarre's, George Smiley novels. Steinhauer put such a human aspect on the characters, not super human but human with flaws and mistakes, making the reader sympathetic to his plight.
View all 3 comments. Aug 20, Dianne rated it liked it Shelves: netgalley , zread. AN AMERICAN SPY is not a tingling spy thriller, it is an often convoluted tale with a varied cast that crosses continents, borders, agendas and really do not have that level of likeability or a cause that truly hit me as realistic or riveting.
Round and round we go, a murder here, a murder there, then we re-examine said murders, instead of moving on. I really, really wanted to like this one, I wanted to agree with others who say this is a great read, but, maybe Milo and I are never meant to besties. I was invited to read and review the first three books in the Milo Weaver series by Minotaur Books! This is my honest and voluntary review.
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